Osamu Fujimura

Timeline

1. 1952–1965

   Physics, MIT and Stockholm

   He earns a BS in physics at the University of Tokyo in 1952 and works as a research assistant at the Kobayashi Institute of Physical Research until 1958. From 1958 to 1961 he is a staff member of the Speech Communication Group in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics, supervised by Morris Halle and K. N. Stevens, and he receives his D.Sc. in physics from Tokyo in 1962. A guest researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm from 1963 to 1965, he works under Gunnar Fant.

2. 1965–1973

   Leading Tokyo's speech institute

   In 1965, he becomes a professor at the Research Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (RILP) in the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Medicine, and he directs the institute from 1969 to 1973. During these years RILP becomes an active research center that develops fiberoptic, electromyography and X-ray microbeam tools for studying speech articulation.

3. 1973–1988

   Linguistics and AI at Bell Labs

   In 1973, he moves to AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he heads the Department of Linguistics and Speech Analysis Research until 1984. From 1987 to 1988, he heads the Department of Artificial Intelligence Research.

4. 1978

   A speech synthesis patent

   A 1978 patent, US 4170719, covers his Speech transmission system, a machine that makes speech synthesis with voiced and unvoiced sounds produced differently.

5. 1988–2006

   Professor at Ohio State

   In 1988, he joins the Department of Speech & Hearing Science at Ohio State University as a professor, where he is also a member of the Center for Cognitive Science. He retires as Professor Emeritus in 2003, works at Nagoya University's Center of Excellence from 2003 to 2004, and is a fellow of the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Kyoto from 2004 to 2006.

6. 1991–1999

   Shannon and Acoustical Society awards

   He receives the Shannon Award from NIH/NIDCD in 1991 and the Acoustical Society of Japan's Distinguished Contribution Award in 1999.

7. 1994–2000

   The C/D model

   A 1994 paper at the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing reviews the C/D model, a syllable-based theory of phonetic implementation, and describes a revised algorithm for computing the timing of speech. The model maps phonological information onto articulatory commands, and in 2000 he presents it in a lecture for the IEEE Kansai Section as an explicit computational process that makes the theory of speech experimentally testable.

8. 2017

   Death in Hawaii

   He dies in 2017 after recently moving to Kona, Hawaii for medical treatment. The Phonetic Society of Japan publishes a special journal issue in his honor, and Mark Liberman, whom he hired at Bell Labs in 1975, remembers how he encouraged young researchers in his labs and beyond.